How to address data privacy concerns when using social media data in conservation science

Enrico Di Minin · Christoph Fink · Anna Hausmann · Jens Kremer · Ritwik Kulkarni

200 citations0/0 files storedConservation Biology

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Privacy, Security, and Data Protection Research Data Management Practices Digitalization, Law, and Regulation

Abstract

Social media data are being increasingly used in conservation science to study human-nature interactions. User-generated content, such as images, video, text, and audio, and the associated metadata can be used to assess such interactions. A number of social media platforms provide free access to user-generated social media content. However, similar to any research involving people, scientific investigations based on social media data require compliance with highest standards of data privacy and data protection, even when data are publicly available. Should social media data be misused, the risks to individual users' privacy and well-being can be substantial. We investigated the legal basis for using social media data while ensuring data subjects' rights through a case study based on the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The risks associated with using social media data in research include accidental and purposeful misidentification that has the potential to cause psychological or physical harm to an identified person. To collect, store, protect, share, and manage social media data in a way that prevents potential risks to users involved, one should minimize data, anonymize data, and follow strict data management procedure. Risk-based approaches, such as a data privacy impact assessment, can be used to identify and minimize privacy risks to social media users, to demonstrate accountability and to comply with data protection legislation. We recommend that conservation scientists carefully consider our recommendations in devising their research objectives so as to facilitate responsible use of social media data in conservation science research, for example, in conservation culturomics and investigations of illegal wildlife trade online.

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2019The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines 189011. The Right to Privacy 2016Hyperband: A Novel Bandit-Based Approach to Hyperparameter Optimization 2015The Challenges of Data Quality and Data Quality Assessment in the Big Data Era 2010“But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook 2017EU General Data Protection Regulation: Changes and implications for personal data collecting companies 2016Environmental performance evaluation with big data: theories and methods 2021Digital data sources and methods for conservation culturomics

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